Presented By: Anthony R. Delmond, University of Tennessee at Martin

Writing is an invaluable teaching tool, allowing students to incorporate, fortify, and apply the knowledge they gain in the classroom to real-world situations. Unlike their contemporaries in the humanities, agriculture students tend to be wary of writing assignments, often preferring fact-based multiple-choice or true/false assessments; however, writing remains a crucial component of professional communication in agricultural businesses. Recognizing the dual importance of writing as a learning tool and as a professional-development necessity, and others have developed the novel approach to incorporate creative writing into the science classroom. Following their lead, I have developed a semester-long, scaffolded creative-writing alternative to the conventional paper in a lower-division agricultural business course. To determine the efficacy of the assignment and its impacts on student learning and information retention, I ran two treatments in separate semesters. In the first treatment, students randomly received one of two prompts a traditional research paper or an open-ended creative writing assignment. In the second treatment, students were given a choice. For both treatments and both prompts, there were multiple benchmarks to keep students on track. Preliminary results have been encouraging. Controlling for several key demographics and other variables, the group with the creative writing prompt in the first treatment did not perform statistically differently on the final exam than the group assigned to the conventional paper. Results for the second treatment are forthcoming. Initial student reaction to the project was tepid, but upon completion, student surveys indicated openness to this approach, as long as students had the option to select their treatment. The long-term objective is to encourage student engagement and facilitate deeper learning through the employment of more flexible methods and allowing students to take a more active role in their learning experience.